


a flickering light.

by eoghainy



Category: The Vampire Diaries - L. J. Smith
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23917051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eoghainy/pseuds/eoghainy
Summary: suffering/ˈsəf(ə)riNG/noun;the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.weapons that cause unnecessary suffering.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore, Elena Gilbert/Stefan Salvatore
Kudos: 2





	a flickering light.

**Author's Note:**

> i remember wanting to write a piece similar to this after i finished reading the tvd books written by l.j. i wanted to make this scene more raw, bring to it a different sense of life; i want to pump as much emotion into it as i could without overwhelming it and making it confusing. 
> 
> this was not what i originally wanted to write, but it's been so long since i last read that i've forgotten what the original idea was. lmao. take this instead!

Nothing but white washes at Elena’s vision. Everything is too overpowering for her overtaxed mind; she stands, frustration building as her fists clench and unclench at her sides. There was arguing. Sage was making a good case – his low baritone was persuasive, very swaying as he forces things more into their favor. The Guardians listen to him like they listen to no one else; he commands some form of respect with them, some position that makes them softer on him than everyone else. Even with his father bleeding into every single thing that he does, they _listen_.

Elena can’t offer him the same respect. His words drift away into the background for her as time comes to a standstill. _Damon, Damon, Damon,_ she thought, trying her absolute best to project to him. To get him to _hear_ her. To get him to suddenly not be dead, to be in this room with her. She longs to feel his velvet gaze following her every movements, tracking her across the room, seeing _nothing_ but her. There is no answer to her cries. Everything is silent, empty. Horrifyingly quiet.

Her eyes are swollen, Elena notes dully, as she closes them and presses her fingertips against her tender lids. The pressure is reaffirming; it calms her, just for the shortest moment. Once her hands are at her sides once again, the throbbing returns at full force, and she’s painfully reminded of _why_.

_Why, why, why_.

_“We wouldn’t be able to reach his soul.”_

_Why, why, why, why, why, why._

_“We don’t know where vampire souls go.”_

_Why!_

_“He is too far gone, completely beyond our power.”_

“Try harder!” Elena snaps, her voice cracking. She watches Stefan shift, his stance becoming defensive as he draws closer to her. He’s ready to spring at any moment, at any indication that she’s in danger. The air in the room has changed in tone quite dramatically, and Elena refuses to read it. “Try. Harder.” She pitches her voice properly low, makes sure it’s threatening; it does not carry the same weight that Sage’s does. She does not have his tenor, his smooth baritone. She sounds crazed with grief, like any wrong word might shatter her, might throw her into a deep, uncomfortable frenzy.

Elena is aware of the trembling of her hands, of the fluttering of her heart, of the breathiness in her lungs. She knows she’s close to a meltdown, to a complete loss of her control. They aren’t even _trying_. The emotionless, stone Guardians look back at her with no pity, no love. They don’t care about her; they don’t care about Damon. They never did. All they cared about were the treasures, and their idea of order. They care about fattening their ranks. They care about the potential _loyalty_ Elena will have for them in the future. They care about what _choice_ she will make here, at their funny crossroads.

“We are unable,” the kindest one, Susurre, says. Her tone is placating. Elena _hates_ it. “Damon is far beyond where we can reasonably reach. He cannot be returned to the realm of the living, not by us.”

“We also owe you no debt,” Idola hisses. Elena feels _more_ than hate for her, true and deep down to the absolute marrow of her bones. “You have caused us more problems than we can afford! You should have never been brought in to replace your mother. You are _useless_. Frotting with vampires – the entire _bloodline_ is useless. A complete waste of our time.”

All eyes are on Elena. Stefan is trying to speak to her, his mental projections so loud to the point of where they sound like they’re _screaming,_ a reverberating, vibrating feel against her drums, but she ignores him. There’s a buzzing in her head, and something she has been holding onto with all of her strength releases.

Everything is calm. She even manages a smile, a partial upturn of her lips; the storm inside her, for once, is silent. Elena supposes that truly, this is what it feels like to stand in the eye of a hurricane. To have everything around you become so irrelevant, to know that you are at peace, that nothing can touch you here – it soothes the aches in her soul, fills the cracks of nothingness that have begun to spider outwards. In this, her eye, everything is safe. _She_ is safe.

It doesn’t stop her from retaliation.

The stance doesn’t come close to a finish, nor do the words manage to make it out of her mouth. The power doesn’t radiate from her like it did when Damon died. Nothing happens, mostly because attacking was the most ignorant thing she ever could have done. The Guardians were always one step ahead, how could she have succeeded in getting away with this when there was a whole army present to stop her?

Mylea gets to her first. Her palm is slapped over Elena’s mouth, and before she knows it. she’s being pushed down to the ground; arms crooked painfully behind her back and head kept in something similar to a headlock. Someone is screaming, a high pitch of fear and surprise.

Bonnie?

The buzzing in Elena’s head extends to her hearing. It encompasses everything, consuming her entire being whole; she’s numb to it all. She can’t make out words or phrases, can’t understand the language that she knows and speaks, can’t bring herself to beg for forgiveness for what she had almost done, right up until the switch in her brain flips and suddenly, everything makes sense again.

_“She’s too dangerous to wield this kind of power.”_

It’s Idola making this decision, Elena is sure of it. What those words mean, she doesn’t know. Sage is furious in the background. He’s snarling, and his power sweeps the room in a powerful wave, nearly rocking Elena off her feet. It does nothing. The Guardians and Elena are in their own little world, and suddenly, Elena’s eye isn’t safe anymore. The Guardians have invaded the one place she thought they couldn’t touch her, and all sense of calm flies out of her grasp.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the silvery sheen of the Wings of Protection as they suddenly appear. _Her_ wings. The feathers catch the light of this obscenely bright room, reflecting rainbows off the gleaming edges, and Elena thinks that it’ll be safe _inside_ them. The Guardians can’t get her _inside_ the Wings of Protection. No, not these ones. They’ll act like the strongest steel when she’s safe within them, absolutely impregnable.

But they don’t wrap around her like she expects them to. They don’t cradle her in a warm, comforting embrace. They don’t shield her from any impending attack.

There’s a soft, dull snip. Then another. A pile of silver feathers drop to Elena’s feet as a great weight is relieved from her shoulders, and for the briefest of seconds, time stops. There’s blood on the tips of the feathers, _her_ blood. She feels no pain until the very moment that she does.

Elena chokes back a shriek of agony and surprise as the Guardians offer her no time to recover. She sees white as the fluffy, stunning Wings of Purification are revealed, and sheared off just as fast. Silver and white mix together at her feet, muddled through with rust colored blood, and Elena _sobs_. It’s a grating, mournful cry, shot through with heavy vibrations of agony at her loss. This was somehow worse, but also utterly incomparable, to what it had felt like to lose Damon.

This time, when the soothing violet-blue of the Wings of Remembrance fills her gaze and quickly disappear, Elena’s knees give out. The Guardians are all but holding her up as she wails, shredding her voice down to the rawest chord. Layers and layers of her are being stripped away, ripped violently from her body, with no promise of return and no apology offered. The rainbow comes and goes as the Wings of Redemption are snipped off of her, and blood trickles hot down her spine. Blackness pulses at the edges of her vision as she gasps, fighting for every breath now, unwilling to go under.

The room is filled with gold as the Wings of the Wind are revealed, massive in length and absolutely baffling with their height. They take some hacking this time to get off, several deep cuts to the thick cartilage as opposed to the easy, simple snips, and Elena spares no vocalization of her grief. She sounds like a wild animal to her own ears, a grieving creature with no ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, no optimism to cling onto blindly. She has nothing now as she cries, waiting for the final strike that will leave her mutilated and so tragically deformed.

Everything is black now as all the light in the room is blotted out. The Wings of Destruction seems to attract all light present to them, seems to absorb both artificial and natural light into its power, like a black hole dragging everything to its core. It would be so easy, right now, just to say the words, but Elena can’t muster the strength. All she is capable of is whimpering as they’re essentially hacked right out of her skin, cartilage and all, and they fall to the ground with a solid, ugly _thump_.

They do not shatter into millions of different, dark colored feathers upon impact. They do not lose their appendage form. They’re a bloody stained mess on the ground, a reminder of what she had tried to do. What she had failed at. What her attempt has _cost_ her. Elena stares at them, her throat aching, and finds she has no more tears left to cry.

She has nothing else to give.

“Isn’t that enough?” Sage hisses. His own wings are out, black and dark against the white of the Celestial Court, but he is unthreatening. Even he would not dare bring the wrath of the Court down upon them. Elena stares at him dully, unable to notice his strange, feral beauty. “ _Have you made her suffer enough_?”

“We must be thorough,” Ryannen whispers to Idola, as if Sage could not hear their voices. “We must leave no trace of power within her.”

Bonnie’s terrified cry forces Elena to look at her. Her best friend is safely tucked in Stefan’s arms, her pretty heart-shaped face buried in his wide chest. All she can see is Bonnie’s leaf-strewn red curls, and one slim hand curled in the fabric of Stefan’s shirt. Stefan is looking at her, pleading, his mental voice making no strides upon her. She did not care to hear him now. She wanted to be left alone in her misery, to die like this; broken and bleeding, the best parts of her stripped raw.

“The blood, we have to purify her blood.” Idola shoots a nasty look at Sage, who hisses back at her. His fury is absolutely palpable from this distance.

“It will kill her to do so.” Sage’s stance widens. Something familiar about his chosen pose stirs at Elena’s interest, but she feels too dead to properly investigate. The emptiness within is crushing, and it sucks her in like a shitty romance novel. “Haven’t you done enough to her already?”

“We will just have to risk it.” Ryannen murmurs, and there’s something along the lines of disappointment in her eyes. “You wouldn’t dare break the truce. We will do this, and we will send you all on your way. One day, she will be none the wiser as to what happened here.”

_Do not talk about me as if I am not here_ , sparks fly as anger lights within Elena, but she is unable to give it proper attention. The deafening tidal wave of nothingness is almost the most comforting thing she’s ever felt in her entire life; it meant that there was no more pain, no more suffering. There was no more occasion to grieve or mourn, no more thought to the blights that plagued her. No memory of what she had just endured, no whisper of the pain as everything . . . faded . . .

It was like she was drifting again, locked in Matt’s truck and drowning in that icy water. Everything had taken a dream-like quality then, as she had been dying, strapped into the driver’s seat and unable to escape. Her surroundings were too bright for the depth’s underneath Wickery Bridge, everything too crystalline and too brilliant. Things that shouldn’t be so in focus were, like the small drops of water beading on the windshield, or the little cracks that were beginning to form in the passenger window. How it had seemed like a bad dream as she drifted further away, the icy quality of the water inspiring numbness and killing her panic in its tracks. It had been peaceful in a disturbing way, like right now was peaceful.

But the illusion was shattered, as an angry, fiery sensation seared through her veins. Elena couldn’t help herself as she screams, as she finds the energy to writhe within the Guardians grasp; the pain was _everywhere_ , burning her up from the inside out.

_Stefan!_ She thought with as much force as she could, trying to mentally beg her soulmate to help her, please, take this pain off of her – but there was no answer. The silence in her head was deafening and terrible this time around as howls tore from her destroyed throat, as her body instinctively fought against this destroying, all-consuming agony as it raced through her body from head to toe. It left no piece of her untouched, left no section of her body unaffected by this; it consumed her completely and utterly, and left her on the verge of death’s door once it withdrew just as quickly as it came on.

Released now from the Guardians, Elena finds herself on the floor, gasping and shaking all over as she tries to get a hold over herself. Stefan was by her side, his hands gentle on her skin, but her nerves were overly sensitive, and she flinched away from him, unable to vocalize any longer. She couldn’t even speak – her voice caught in her throat any time she tried, and there was no pushing any sound through.

It’s a fitting punishment, isn’t it?

“You are lucky she is still alive.” Sage’s voice is seething with rage. Elena wants to beg him to shut up, to let this go, to let _her_ go. “This place would not still be standing if she had died.”

“Does it look like we care?” Idola was fast with the retort. “ _You_ are lucky we did not see fit to punish _all_ of you for this one’s mistakes.” Elena knew Idola was speaking about her. She had enough strength to be annoyed by her blatant flippancy. “Get yourselves out of here, before we decide to change our mind.”

“You will keep good on your end of the bargain, th – . . .”

* * *

Elena opens her eyes to the familiar ceiling of her room. White, popcorn textured; the very same ceiling she’s scraped her palms on time and time again in childhood when fooling around with Bonnie, Meredith and Caroline. She relaxes, relieved, until her awareness spreads to her body. Each breath taken was a painful exercise in how much pain she could tolerate, and every piece of her ached like she had been hit by a truck. Not to mention the abstract burning of her shoulders . . .

It all came back to her in a rush.

She didn’t notice that Stefan was in her bed with her, but she definitely notices when he wraps his strong arms around her. Elena cried herself out against his chest, finding that it was easier this time around, when the grief clouding her brain didn’t make everything so _difficult_. When she had first awoken, after destroying the most sacred of the treasures, cloudiness and exhaustion had made it hard to process and acknowledge what had been happening around her.

Now, she was all too tuned in. She was too hyperaware of everything; of how loud her sobs were, how fragilely Stefan held her now, of how if she was too loud, she’d wake Aunt Judith and have to explain why she had Stefan Salvatore in her bed after curfew. She was aware of the fact that she must have passed out in the Celestial Court; she did not remember coming back here, nor did she remember what the final terms were.

As she cried, she mourned for the loss of her powers. Of her own personal, awful loss of self the second the last set of wings were sheared off. She mourned for Damon and how he had, for the first time _ever_ , actually sacrificed himself for someone else. How they had finally been getting to somewhat stable ground, how they had finally found an equilibrium that could exist between the two of them without taking everything around them down. How nothing would ever be the same, for they all knew too much – they knew what truly happened here in Fell’s Church, but no one else here would ever remember any of it. How they’d never realize how close they had been to the brink of destruction, and they’d never realize that time was rewound to make everything seem as if it was okay.

Okay. Would any of it be okay again?

They remained together, wordless, until the beginnings of dawn, when Elena had finally hiccupped to a stop and had no more left to give. She couldn’t hear Stefan in her head anymore, and anxiety churned her stomach to the point of where she felt nauseous. None of it was going to be the same; they all carried the scars of what they had endured now, and it would never leave their skin.

Neither of them needed words now. Elena held up her hand expectantly, and Stefan obliges her by twining their fingers together, a cautious edge appearing in his gaze. He still did not know which brother her heart belonged to, but the answer had always been the same. Her reaction to Damon’s loss did not change that, not for her. She had been devoted and promised to one man since this all began, and that man was the one holding her right now.

And there, in the midst of their shared suffering and their losses, eternity was promised once more.


End file.
